The Evolution of Jeremiah

Topic courtesy of Scog Blog.

Where do I start to talk about this subject. It is entirely too painful to imagine, because at the end of this story, even you will want to know the truth, yet like me, you probably don’t want to go there, as I don’t today either.

First we need some music to distract me while I write. Ok, ready, set, GO!!

My mother is Canadian, my father is American. A war veteran of the viet nam war, a father of two and a raging alcoholic with issues that never saw the light of day. He imported a wife gave her an ultimatum and got her pregnant. Little lies come back to haunt you later in life, so be careful the lies you tell your children, because eventually those little lies become BIG lies that may fracture your family beyond the hopes of any repair or reconciliation.

For twenty five years my brother and I were under the impression that all was well under our roof and that everything was on the up and up. Until the anniversary that we bought an item and had it engraved only to find out that the dates were wrong! What did you say, the dates were wrong? My mother had been impregnated prior to the wedding and on that day she said those vows, I was inches away from the rings that passed from him to her. This revelation will come to bear much later in the time line.

So we can surmise that my grandmother on my maternal side probably swung her bag at my father’s head and barricaded him into a corner and made him marry her, now that she was carrying his baby, this was 1967, and premarital sex was a SIN, punishable by the Catholic Church in ways that today are still practiced, but probably not to the extent that they were in the 60’s.

Can you imagine a 4 foot two little Canadian powerhouse to be a force to reckon with. Legends speaks of Memere being a little powerhouse of strength in a little tiny body. My father abused this woman until the day she died. He called her a frog, and an old goat. He made her cry every time he spoke to her with his vile tongue. My father’s abuse of the women in his life was legendary. God forgive him…

My mother was boxed into a situation that there was no escape, no option and no complaint. The fact that she wasn’t naturalized until 1974, she was still a Canadian Citizen, a citizenship she gave up for my father – and the agreement was that she would have no contact with the Quebecers in the family from that point out. He was mistaken. Sadly mistaken. Who was going to babysit his kid while they both worked jobs around the clock? My grandmother’s and my aunt’s and uncles. (Who were Quebecers!)

My father was the lone white boy in a French Canadian family, since he was an only child he was the odd man out. They had the balance of power in this family dynamic. He was at a loss to do anything, so what did he do? He, on many occasions, tried to kill me. There are stories that I learned in this life where they stood against him so that he would not hurt me fatally. Stories from my aunts and my own memory of my grandmothers threatening him with jail and death if he hurt me or my mother. While I was in their care I was safe. But when I was home, my mother and I were fair game.

Being a third generation alcoholic (in recovery) I have dealt with the past for years now. When I came to Montreal, I spoke to all of the family that I could find to corroborate all the stories I had ‘heard’ and the things I witnessed myself. My paternal grandfather was a raging alcoholic. My father was one too. They BOTH beat their wives and children. And they enjoyed it.

My father’s favorite condemnation was that “I was a mistake and should never have been born.” He beat those words into me every chance that he got. I screwed up his plans. He was forced into marriage because he screwed around and he got caught. My father had a skeleton in his closet, that I am today convinced within a shadow of a doubt that I am right. I’m a gay man, I have spent my life studying “gay!”

Growing up was difficult. The saving grace was God and the faith of the women who stepped in to shape the boy I would become. There were few instances in my recollection that men played crucial roles in my life. They freaked me out. They made me uncomfortable. Something happened to me as a child – a sin that should never be uttered because the damnation from God would be exact and total.

There are crucial memories that I can think about where my father was chasing me through houses with a bat in his hand, and my grandmothers stood in door ways from allowing him to enter into room where I was hiding. My mother never said a word. She never did anything – in front of me. I don’t remember ever seeing her or hear her say to him, ‘please stop, don’t do that!’ She knew better than to say anything to him, because if she did he beat her harder. She would never leave him or ever address the situation with anyone, because back then, wives married for life, like animals once they bonded it was forever.

My mother lived with the fear that if she ever tried to leave that my father would kill her, and he used to say that to her countless times over my life, when things got bad. Men like my father were running ragged through the lives of many, and they blame this kind of behavior on ’shell shock syndrome’ like the fucking war had anything to do with the choices they made after the war… Bull Fucking shit !!!

When I hit my teen age years, my father became somewhat an animal. His drinking was exacerbated by years of denial and anger. My mother’s family had systematically been surgically removed from us as a family. For the first part of our lives (my brother and I) we had summer vacations away from parents 1500 miles away to be exact.

When I turned 13 – illness hit the family like the plague. My grandmother fell first being hit by a stroke that turned a vibrant and most incredible Italian mother and grandmother into a atrophied mass of slurring misery. She was hit so hard that she never recovered. My father took me out of school and flew me 1500 miles to be at her bedside, hoping that the apple of her eye would rouse her from her silence. My mother stayed behind to care for my brother. That day is burned into my soul, a bad dream that I never woke up from.

Neither did she…

That morning I walked into that hospital room and there she was, lying in her own diaper, drool falling from her mouth, that was contorted and deformed, she was right side affected and her face had slid apart in opposing directions. The shock was so instantaneous that I passed out cold, hitting the floor like a rock. I woke up in the ER being looked at because my head hit the floor like a stone. I was ok, she would never be. For a week I sat by that bed begging her to wake up and talk to me, that never happened. I don’t think my father ever forgave me for failing him…

He never let me forget that…

They brought me home, failure that I was. My father’s drinking started severely and you know who he came after right? Me!!! Over the years I got away from him, saved by friends, and the church, and most importantly the Youth Group. My mother was a silent witness to all of this. She remained detached. I learned that I was my brother’s keeper, I was a maid, a yard boy and a bar tender… And my father’s whipping post.

My father’s father had a stroke a year to the day of my grandmother. My father was devastated. They both died years later, fractions of the people they were in life. My father was inconsolable, yet he continued to take out his shit on me and my brother and also our mother. Life was not kind to anyone…

I escaped into music. I escaped into reading, I escaped whenever I could with whatever I could get my hands on. Alcohol!!! My parents taught me that drinking was ok, it was part of life and better that I drink at home then anywhere else. Drinking was a food group in our house. Both my brother and I indulged in the ‘drink.’ Excessively…

Watching my parents get shit stinking drunk and do stupid things with guests and family was an event. It was ‘must see tv.’ I remember one night in particular that one pair of aunt and uncle were visiting from Canada, and they polished off lots of liquor and wine and set off for one of those ‘big box’ stores that we had close by. They were all shit stinking drunk, my aunt mistakenly shop lifted a kitchen spoon from the store and when we got home my mother was on the kitchen floor trying to stretch a sandwich sized zip lock bag to fit the garbage can in the kitchen. That memory is burned into my soul too…

My family was a mess of alcoholics… I did not escape…

My father beat my mother, he beat my brother, and first and foremost, he beat me senseless. He had a dedicated room in the house where the ‘beatings’ took place and God forbid my mother intercede. I went to task to save them both from him. In order to keep him away from them, he needed a reason, and I gave him several. He would start an argument, and I would egg him into a room where he was not with them. It got so bad that I put a lock on my bedroom door, to keep him out, and he took the door off the hinges.

My father wanted 24 hour access to every room in the house, nobody was safe and nobody had the right to their own space. And for that infraction, I was punished relentlessly. My mother did nothing to stop it. When I turned 18 – I became a man. And at that point I was on my own. When I graduated high school, my father was finished.

He had driven a wedge so deep between my mother and I that it was never reconciled. I moved away and started my life, alone and clueless. What did I know about the world? Nothing. I had also had sexuality issues which I never spoke about because I knew where my parents sat on that issue. My mother knew. She knew damn well what was going on and what time it was. And she did nothing. My mother worked in home health care, taking meds home to sick people at home. On countless occasions she came home from a hard days work, with her boss and along with my father used to sit and get sloshed on beer and talk about those faggots who were sick and were pathetic and should die quickly because my mother hated serving the sick…

This little truth deeply affected me later in the time line…

I hit several bad patches in my young life and had to rely on the charity of my parents and that was a bitter pill to swallow. I made several crucial mistakes as a young man. Never default on car payments when your father is the loan holder, because if the car gets repossessed, as it happened to me, that pissed him off forever. Hey I was an alcoholic, what did I know about responsibility? As long as there was alcohol and boys in my life, who knew the wiser???

I never told my parents that I was gay. But I made a second crucially tragic decision. I went out one night and got sloshed and brought home a boy I was sleeping with, in my parent’s house… Never bring a boy home to your parents house. My father walked outside and with a grease gun wrote the word FAGGOT across the side and rear of my pristine white Mustang…

The relationship was severed at that point…

I moved out to live with a series of failed attempts at life. When I was 25 I moved to Ft. Lauderdale to find love, this ‘moving for love’ would be a recurring theme for a decade. I met the boy who would change my life for good. He was a swindler, a liar and a cheat. He was screwing his ex and me at the same time. He was a diabetic who was sick, so I handled his blood strips and his soiled items. He kept one truth from me until he killed himself.

He had AIDS, and didn’t tell me…

In July of 1994, I was diagnosed with AIDS and given 18 months to live… Cue up the statement by my mother up there in this post… I had to tell them. You want further family fracture, your gay son, now had aids and was going to die. I lost my then boyfriend, all the friends that I knew, the family was besides themselves when I finally told them. If it were not for my then BOSS who became father, mentor, caregiver and Master, I surely would have died. Todd is the angel who saved me from immanent death.

My parents always worried what others would think of them and that preoccupied them, what others thought was more important to them then doing the right thing. I called a family meeting, I asked for support and love and that was all. I got not one thing….

Only heart ache…

What will you tell your friends? NOTHING…

In 1997 I went home for Christmas for the last time. My mother had locked me in my room at night. She bade me eat off plastic plates and drink from plastic glasses. She placed bleach in all the bathrooms and forbid me from talking to anyone nor using the phone or the car. I was 27 years old…

My parents closest friends watched my parents humiliate me on Christmas night at dinner by forbidding me from eating at the table with everyone. They set up a card table in another room, with plastic utensils, and there they left me. The son of that couple, got up from the table and came and ate with me so that I would not eat alone on Christmas. The next day, I was taken out on their boat for a day with father and son alone, and I told them my truth. That same visit, I bought the son some gifts for his kindness to my mother over the years, because my father was working out of state screwing a woman in his office, behind my mother’s back. I called him on that later on… he never admitted it. But I am a witch and I knew … I wanted to take these gifts to him one afternoon and my mother had a fucking fit. She accused me of many things, that will remain unspoken.

After that I never went home again. My mother visited me once when I lived in Ft. Lauderdale and they spent a night at my place, however painful that was for them. That never happened again. My father and mother made several strategic decisions that cost them dearly over the years after that. I got sober in 1994 and stayed sober for four years.

When My mother’s mother died, I was inconsolable. It was the worst news I could ever bear. I had enough money to fly up for the funeral – but my MOTHER told me that I was not allowed at the funeral service, because God forbid that the family find out I had AIDS. That sealed the deal for my mother, I hated her for that decision. She was resolute in her decisiveness. She was a woman on the edge…

That was one crucial decision that cemented my hatred for my mother because of the ways she treated me – although I wanted so badly over the years to forgive her, which I eventually did. I never vocalized these feelings to her ever. But the resentment simmered for years and years…

In 1998, I had a moment of clarity holding my bible and a Pearl Jam cd in my hands one night, the message was clear. ‘Jeremy’s spoken.’ I set forth the damning act that would show my utter disrespect and contempt for my father, I legally changed my name…

I would never carry my father’s name from that day forward…

I knew that if I got sick and my parents came in legally to do away with any memory or vestige of me and secret my corpse to some godforsaken graveyard or better worse no proper burial because I was now paying for my decision to be Gay and that God was now punishing me with his greatest curse AIDS… I had to act decisively. And I did…

They would never be able to touch me by any means…

When I decided to ‘move for love’ again, this trip cost me everything I owned and almost my life. I slipped into alcohol and drugs this time… it nearly killed me…

In the summer of 2000 I landed back in Miami, sleeping on the floor of my best friends apartment for three months until I found a place of my own to begin rebuilding. I did not speak to my parents much at all. I was working in a club doing lights and maintenance.

One morning I woke up and looked in the mirror and saw my father looking back at me and that traumatized me. I called the nearest salon and started a transformation to make sure he never looked at me in the mirror again. This dark haired boy became a platinum blond. I was trying to dye away the pain.

On New Years Eve 2000-2001 I was working an all nighter at the bar. I got home around 6 a.m. and went to bed. Around 9 a.m. my mother called me. “We are in Miami and we’ve been here for a week, and we are on our way home and I wanted to come see you!”

Well, fuck me raw, I didn’t know they were in the same city over a holiday and they never called me…

They drove across the causeway to the beach half an hour later they arrived. I was surprised to say the least. I asked them to stay for lunch, that I would pay for parking and take them out for a meal. My father said emphatically NO. He was in a hurry to get on the road, it was a four hour ride home. God forbid they take an hour to visit with me. He parked the car in a fire zone and bade my mother 20 minutes to visit with me. We walked around the block and talked. Then she got in the car and they drove away…

Come in from the rain…

I never saw my mother again…

On December 9th 2001 – I got sober a second time… I am still sober today.

In April 2002, I came to Montreal to visit another “friend” who wanted to love me. I set an action in motion that rocked my parents to the core. The little lies my parents told us so many years prior, NOW came to bear. I obtained a “birthright” application because I fell inside a date window to apply for my Canadian citizenship because by law, my mother still retained her Canadian Citizenship until 1974, well after my brother was born in 1970. I would use my parent’s lies as my exit from the United States. I would not die in some hole, hungry and sick, with no one to know that I was alive or dead.

*****************************

I came to Montreal for a week. I loved it so much I stayed for two…

That was Easter of 2002.

I went back to Miami to close up shop, sell everything I owned, packed what I could into boxes and mailed them North. A week later I was back on a plane to Montreal. You see, I waited until I was 34 for my father to drop dead, I even prayed that God should smite him because he was an evil troll. I was going to wait until he died and then move to my mother and rebuild what I could of a relationship. That never happened…

That move into ‘love’ died as quick as it started. I was sober, he was not. Yet we had other issues that could not be resolved. I moved into Montreal on my own.

My parents were livid.

I had driven the proverbial “Last nail into the Coffin.”

In 2002 I met the man that I would marry. In the Fall of 2004, I proposed marriage after the Gay Marriage Legislation was passed in the Canadian Parliament. We were married on November 20th 2004, on my mother’s birthday…

Isn’t that a kick in the rubber parts…

We had had several phone call conversations. I mailed my mother a letter every other week for a year, hoping she would reply, but never did. How dare I move to Canada and give up my American roots and as my father so eloquently put “Spit in his face!” How dare I disrespect him by following my mother’s roots and my faith history!!

We invited my parents to the wedding.
The card came back “We do not do GAY!”

Catholicism was alive and well in my family even if they had not walked into a church in over ten years. They were indignant. The last conversation I had with my mother went like this:

We don’t condone homosexuality and we won’t come to your wedding so stop trying. And let me tell you this, if either one of us gets sick and dies we will not contact you nor tell you when the funeral is or where we are buried…

That was that. So let it be written, so let it be done…

I never spoke to my mother again after that.

On the eve of our first wedding anniversary, my mother appeared in my bedroom to me, she came to tell me that she was sick and that she was going to die. She said her words then disappeared. I never called to confirm, because the truth would have killed me.

A year later on the eve of our second wedding anniversary, I saw my mother again in my bedroom, she did not speak this time, she just stood there and looked at me, and disappeared. I never saw her again…

I never called to confirm what I had seen – but I did on occasions troll the obituaries to see if she was listed. To this date, I have never found one. The last email conversation I had with my father many months ago, I asked him referential pointed questions that answered in a particular slant would tell me the truth. His words confirmed the truth but I never ever called to confirm.

I have only a memory of what my mother looked like on the last day I looked upon her face, and said goodbye. I could never bring myself to make that call because if my mother is truly dead and I am told that – knowing what they told me, that I would not be notified after the fact, that I would go insane and do something really stupid…

I can’t afford that kind of grief and sorrow, so I live with the vision I had and the voice of my mother who said goodbye to me in her own way… And God forgive them both for what they chose to do to the family that was theirs to care for and foster…

Many years later during my sobriety I worked my steps and made several attempts to make amends and build bridges, all those attempts failed miserably. But I became a Canadian Citizen, I got married, went back to school at age 35, and in June I will graduate with a Bachelors of Arts Degree in Religion.

I pray for them and I have forgiven them because they did their best with what God gave them. They were in my life for a brief period of time, then it was over. I cannot fault them or be angry with them. They say that in some cases the people we came into the world with may not be with us for an entire lifetime, so we should respect the time we do have.

I have many mothers today that love me and care for me beyond my wildest dreams, and I have made them proud by becoming the best man I can be to them, the world and especially my husband, who is my life.

So ends the sermon on Mother…